Suffer Little Children

What’s on my mind? 

I am preoccupied with children’s unexpressed emotional pain due to their parents’ irresponsible decisions and dysfunctional home environments. 

Children are frequently kicked around like a football by competing parents driven by selfish desires. Parents seem to believe that children serve the purpose of satisfying their emotional needs.  So, they either fight with each other over the children, use them as pawns, or use children like fashionable handbags to boast.

Children cannot understand the intricate and crazy dynamics of parental relationships, the emotions triggered by parental football matches, or the language to articulate the emotional impact on themselves. So, naturally, they internalise their feelings; these feelings sometimes have psychosomatic effects, or they find the best way to act them out:  rage, aggression, unhealthy habits, deviant behaviour, or illness, among other things.

When children are introduced to the wider world of school, neighbourhood, social media, and society, they enter multiple football matches. Movers and shakers in these respective life spaces kick them around. The abuse and manipulation continue.  The process of internalisation continues unabated and unaddressed up until adulthood. 

Then! Voila! Learned coping behaviour, such as withdrawing in silence or aggression to deal with conflicts, flows unconsciously into adult life and adult relationships, causing dangerous social and psychological ripple effects – domestic violence, school violence, and road rage.  And the cycle begins again. Unhealed wounded adults are responsible for nurturing children at home and in our schools.

When will the cycle be unbroken?  To save our children, we must save the adults.

 “Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:14)